We may not live in Kansas, like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, but spring in Northwest Iowa has brought with it winds strong enough to send Toto into flight.

This year's cool and wet spring has made our state's propensity for wind even more apparent. And, with oil prices over $117 a barrel, it's no wonder that more and more folks are looking to the skies to fulfill our future energy needs.

A new report from the American Wind Energy Association puts Iowa number one in terms of the percentage of its electricity that comes from wind farms. About 5.5 percent of our power comes from those tall, white monoliths that dot our landscape.

That's a lot of juice from a technology that had barely been born 10 years ago.

Environmentalists have called the Midwest the "Saudi Arabia of renewal energy," and this windy spring I believe them.

It got me thinking about opportunities in the future for family-sized generation facilities.

I found out those systems, 'small wind energy systems," are available now.

And I think it would be pretty cool. So I checked out the specs. And, on our little three-acre plot, we could conceivably put up a turbine. Of course, the 80 foot height might scare the neighbors, and the puppy, and the lambs when those get here.

And the $40,000 price tag for an "average" home system scares me.

But, with energy costs rising, the statistics are pretty impressive for wind to be an option to help decrease our dependance on foreign oil. And, despite the recent building boom in our region of large turbines, we've not even begun to tap the real potential. Currently, the U.S. wind generating capacity totals over 12,600 MW and is expected to have generated about 31 billion kWh of electricity last year. That's about 1 percent of the U.S. electricity supply.

Contrast that to the total amount of electricity that could potentially be generated from wind in the US - 10,777 billion kWh annually.

That's more than twice the electricity generated by any means in the U.S. last year.

Guess that will make me look at those nasty prairie winds a bit differently from now on.